Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Fuelled by Urine - Cheaper than Platinum

Urine powered
fuel cell

Cheap fuel cells that use
carbonised and dried urine as a catalyst in place of platinum could be a
reality in the near future.

Fuel cells often use
platinum as a catalyst, driving up the cost of the technology. Researchers have
been looking at ways to replace the metal with carbon nanostructures, but those
are expensive to produce too.

Researchers from the
Department of Advanced Materials Chemistry, Korea University demonstrated that
equally effective carbon compounds can be extracted from urine — making them a
cheap stand-in for platinum or synthetic carbon.

The scientists collected
urine samples from healthy individuals, which they heated to evaporate the
water contents, leaving behind a dried, yellowish deposit. They then
super-heated various test samples of dried urine in a range between 700 and
1,000 degrees Celsius for six hours to carbonise the urine.

The heating process caused
salts and other elements to gasify and leave behind carbon. Urine is loaded
with other elements besides carbon, which makes the leftover carbon highly
porous — ideal for fuel cell catalysts.

Most importantly, the urine
carbon was an excellent conductor of electricity, especially the batch that was
heated to 1,000 degrees. Researchers said this is the first time carbon was
extracted from urine using this simple method.

According to the
scientists, roughly 300 to 400 milligrams of urine carbon can be extracted from
a single litre of urine, and the ease of harvest means this could very well be
a scalable idea.